The art of self-care for a patient with Type-1 diabetes typically involves an assortment of professional Health Care counseling, hard-copy guide sheets provided by a Health Care Professional, self-care reading material and improvisation based on well established general principles of how the endocrine system operates. However, this knowledge is hard won and not easily put into practice by patients with Type-1 diabetes.
A person with type 1 diabetes will typically die well within a year without insulin. Even still, not all such persons are willing to make alterations to their (necessary—life sustaining) doses. They administer fixed fast-acting insulin doses in conjunction with meals and rarely, if ever, make alterations to those doses. Additionally, they administer doses of a slower-acting insulin to contend with their background needs (e.g., mobility) not associated with meals.
By contrast, for persons with type 2 diabetes: approximately only 30% of these persons inject insulin, more of those persons can benefit from injecting insulin, and not all of these persons need insulin, meaning diet, exercise and oral “meds” may suffice.
Accordingly, a device and method are provided that automates insulin dosing advice.
According to one aspect of the present invention, a device for providing improved drug dosing advice to a patient is provided. The device being a portable, handheld and battery powered device comprising: an evaluation and interpretation facility comprising a processor for executing a program, a memory for storing a program to be executed by the processor and for storing and retrieving data used by the program, a display for displaying data and instructions to the user, and a human interface for entering data, and instructions stored on the memory as part of the program. When the program is executed by the processor, it causes the evaluation and interpretation facility to: determine a first expected dose of the drug; determine a first actually administered dose of the drug, determine whether the first actually administered dose differs from a first expected dose of the drug, determine a second expected dose of the drug; determine a second actually administered dose of the drug, determine whether the second actually administered dose differs from a second expected dose, and calculate a third expected dose on the basis of the first actually administered dose and the second actually administered dose when the first actually administered dose is determined to differ from the first expected dose and the second actually administered dose is determined to differ from the second expected dose.
Additional features of the present invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon consideration of the following detailed description of the presently perceived best mode of carrying out the invention.